Ali Shibleh walks amid the ruins of the ancient city of Ebla, a publicly celebrated archaeological site, in Tell Mardikh, Syria, March 10, 2013. The ancient city's excavation has offered many insights into early Syrian civilization, but the long civil war in the country and opportunistic digging by gravediggers and treasure hunters is taking a toll on the site. (Bryan Denton/The New York Times)

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FILE -- Michael Moss, author of "Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us," in New York, May 7, 2010. Moss' book looks at the search by manufacturers for the "bliss point" in foods as rates of obesity soared. (Tony Cenicola/The New York Times)

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Noel Paul Stookey had a “born-again” conversion.

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So did John Michael Talbot of Mason Proffit fame.

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Years ago, U2 sold its first albums through Christian bookstores. The band's Bono (right) and Adam Clayton perform in a East Rutherford, N.J., football stadium.

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Third Day's Mac Powell is a Christian rocker.

Bob Gersztyn owned a fine collection of 300 rock 'n' roll albums in 1971, the year he accepted Jesus Christ as his personal savior. Among them were some choice 1960s vinyl from Jimi Hendrix, the Beatles, Bob Dylan and the Mothers of Invention.

But all of a sudden, this was the devil's music.

“I destroyed some of them with a hammer and took the rest to a used record store,” he recalled with a laugh. “I think I kept 10 classical music albums that I decided were not anti-Christian.”

Gersztyn retained his love of rock 'n' roll, but limited his listening to Christian rock, a genre that was just getting going in the era of the hippie-inspired “Jesus freaks” and the hit Broadway musical “Jesus Christ Superstar.”

He joined a Four Square Gospel Church in Los Angeles, enrolled in Bible college, became a Pentecostal preacher and emceed and booked concerts for Christian artists.

Today, at 65, Gersztyn's religious fervor has mellowed. He rarely attends church and calls himself “an allegorical Christian.” But he has put together his love of pop music and photography to publish an illustrated, two-volume work titled “Jesus Rocks the World: The Definitive History of Contemporary Christian Music.”

The book, some 600 pages, traces the history of Jesus music from Negro spirituals, gospel and blues to its modern-day roots in Southern California with the Calvary Chapel and Vineyard church movements in the 1970s.

Gersztyn, who grew up in a Catholic family in suburban Detroit, decided Jesus was the answer when he heard a radio account of how guitarist Jeremy Spencer had suddenly quit Fleetwood Mac during a performance at the Hollywood Bowl. It was soon learned that Spencer ran off with an infamous evangelical Christian sect called the Children of God.

His mind altered by an estimated 100 LSD trips in the 1960s, Gersztyn convinced his girlfriend to head out to Southern California with him to join the Children of God.

“I was smoking pot one day when Jesus appeared to me in a vision,” he recalled. “He told me he was the source of all love, then said, 'Come follow me.'”

Gersztyn wound up joining the Four Square Church rather than the Children of God.

Gersztyn considers Christian country-rock musician Larry Norman, who died in 2008 at 60, to be the single most important figure in the history of contemporary Christian music. He is remembered for his 1969 Capitol Records album “Upon this Rock,” and his song “Why Should the Devil Have All the Good Music,” which features the verse, “Jesus is the rock and he rolled my blues away.”

Now living in Salem, Ore., Gersztyn said his musical horizons widened in 1987, when he went to see a Dylan concert in Eugene. Dylan, then in his evangelical Christian phase, was opening for the Grateful Dead.

“Most of the people were there to see the Dead, not Dylan,” Gersztyn recalled. “I was still really into the Christian thing, and being a minister, and didn't want to get too close to the Deadheads because I thought God wouldn't be happy about it.”

In his book, however, Gersztyn writes that the emotionalism and improvisational spirit that inspires a great Grateful Dead concert is not that much different than the Holy Spirit that drives parishioners to gospel music ecstasy in many African American churches.

“In both instances,” he writes, “the experience is communal with the audience or congregation being as much a part of the show as the performers.”